New Game: Zooming Secretary
Posted: Wed Oct 25, 2017 6:39 am
Zooming Secretary is an Action Platform, arcade style game, which puts you in the role of an overworked secretary. The protagonist really has her work cut out for her, as she battles to answer phones while encountering a blabbing boss, a gossiping coworker, careless movers, and the pre-requesite office romances. All this before the callers hang up, to avoid getting fired!
The general mechanic of the game revolves around phones randomly ringing, of which each will display a specific topic. Each filing cabinet has a topic, and when the secretary passes over it, she will then have the information for that topic and can answer any phone with the same topic. Deceptively simple, this game can get very fast paced as you need to quickly plan routes, and change them along the way to optimize and avoid back tracking for topic changes. In later levels, it is sometimes necessary to rapidly choose which phone to sacrifice while avoiding dropping multiple calls. Try to score on the bonus level, to get 2 extra missed calls before you are fired(this helps quite a bit at the end!).
This is based on the game of the same name by Shiru, with Pinwizz contributing to graphics and sound for the original NES version. I am a fan of his work. Eh, all the same complications here that were there in Alter Ego...actually the source and style was much like AE overall, and the same rather large architecture differences for how things are done on the NES(globs of free ram, no direct vram access, different pointer stuff..people use ALL globals for the CC65 compiler..etc.) had to be taken care, and I feel the code is significantly easier to understand from an Uzebox perspective now.This is basically done as I have less than 1K flash left, which I would like to leave in case future gcc versions generate larger code or someone wants to make a few extra levels(level data is very small). I had to make some tradeoffs and design choices in graphics, and especially sacrifices in sound and music to get it to fit, but overall it is about to the point I am happy with. I am aware of one current gameplay bug, which was present in the original as well: relating to getting "wisdom" on the last level without previously having a topic(and also wisdom displays not the phones topic, but the players, when answered).
Anyways I hope you guys enjoy it, and please do let me know if you find any bugs! Current source code is up on my github, which I will clean up a bit as I fix the last known bug.
The general mechanic of the game revolves around phones randomly ringing, of which each will display a specific topic. Each filing cabinet has a topic, and when the secretary passes over it, she will then have the information for that topic and can answer any phone with the same topic. Deceptively simple, this game can get very fast paced as you need to quickly plan routes, and change them along the way to optimize and avoid back tracking for topic changes. In later levels, it is sometimes necessary to rapidly choose which phone to sacrifice while avoiding dropping multiple calls. Try to score on the bonus level, to get 2 extra missed calls before you are fired(this helps quite a bit at the end!).
This is based on the game of the same name by Shiru, with Pinwizz contributing to graphics and sound for the original NES version. I am a fan of his work. Eh, all the same complications here that were there in Alter Ego...actually the source and style was much like AE overall, and the same rather large architecture differences for how things are done on the NES(globs of free ram, no direct vram access, different pointer stuff..people use ALL globals for the CC65 compiler..etc.) had to be taken care, and I feel the code is significantly easier to understand from an Uzebox perspective now.This is basically done as I have less than 1K flash left, which I would like to leave in case future gcc versions generate larger code or someone wants to make a few extra levels(level data is very small). I had to make some tradeoffs and design choices in graphics, and especially sacrifices in sound and music to get it to fit, but overall it is about to the point I am happy with. I am aware of one current gameplay bug, which was present in the original as well: relating to getting "wisdom" on the last level without previously having a topic(and also wisdom displays not the phones topic, but the players, when answered).
Anyways I hope you guys enjoy it, and please do let me know if you find any bugs! Current source code is up on my github, which I will clean up a bit as I fix the last known bug.